Not so lost in Translation 2

“Slip carefully” is the Google Translate for 小心滑倒, a
common sign in Chinese for “Caution, Slippery”. Hilarious fails aside, we have
to say Chinese-English translation can be tricky. Sometimes, what seem to make
sense logically from the translators’ point of view, is spectacularly wrong for
the audience. Here are four most common reasons for translation fails:

Where does the word begins and ends?

In
Chinese, while each character has their meanings, they are more often put
together to form words 词语,
which means something related but nonetheless quite different. You can see a
typical example in this door plate which reads “burn the dress” in English, when
it should have been “ironing room”. The mistake is that the translation is made
for each word directly, instead of considering the two characters 烫衣 “burn – dress” as a single word to mean ironing. As Chinese is written without gaps in between
words, this is often the most tricky part to tell where the word begins and ends!

Active
or passive?

The
second biggest grammatical challenge it that Chinese words does not have tenses
technically. As such, there is no concept of passive or active voice as defined
by past tense. This could be a problem sometimes, as you can see from this
sign: where it should be “fined”, the translator, with the best intension, was
probably not aware of the need for passive voice!

One word, many meanings

Even when one can
tell which characters should be considered together as a word, sometime a word
has multiple meanings, and one needs to choose carefully which one fits in with
the context. The word 出口, for example, can mean both Export or Exit. In
this sign, it seems they have made the wrong choice.

“Beware of safety” is another typical example where 注意 surely means beware, but in this sign, it should be more accurately understood as “attention to”. It is subtle, but it makes a world of difference!

Sometimes,
however, it is less about accuracy but the context. For example, in this sign,
where deformity, meaning “a part of someone’s body which is not the normal
shape because of injury or illness” (Collins Dictionary) is probably a more
accurate translation of the Chinese word 残疾; “Disabled” is a much better choice in the context of
washrooms.

Indirect reminders

Where
euphemism is at the core of the English language, in Chinese indirect
expressions take another form which may not be easily translated. Both of these
signs would make perfect sense to the Chinese reader: that they should leave
the grass alone and keep the environment clean. They would be considered
literally good signs, as they are polite enough not to tell people what to do
directly. Not only that, they read like poetic couplets with the same number of
characters, and they even rhyme. However, it gets clumsy when the translators
tried to keep the same literary expression and politeness in English.

In the age of automated translation perfected by accelerated
machine learning, these funny fails may soon be a thing in the past. However,
it may be worth pondering, when we no longer have to painstakingly translate
words and sentences, how much then could we really appreciate the process and
intricacy of learning about each others’ languages and bridging our cultures in a meaningful, nuanced
way? This is probably a thought worth chewing on.